5 social media mistakes your business should avoid

How you handle your social media advertising can carry a lot of influence on the development of your business. Modern marketing philosophy is full of dos and don’ts regarding most subjects. However, when it comes to social media marketing, it feels like the groundwork hasn’t been set in stone yet. Marketing experts usually offer advice on how businesses can get more followers and engagement. Yet, somehow, topics of avoiding and preventing common mistakes are mysteriously absent. That’s why our social media marketing agency NYC has decided to explore these essential five social media mistakes your business should avoid.

1. Posting something inappropriate

The most egregious social media mistakes typically come from an employee posting something inappropriate. This is one of those things that, if not handled properly, can blow up in your face. Social media disasters are hard to recover from. A bad reputation can follow you, seemingly forever. On the other hand, you can get negative attention by posting something that’s normally fine. Unfortunately, it just happens to negatively interact with a trending topic. In reality, this is more common than you think. Social media mistakes mostly occur as unfortunate accidents.

Posts for marketing campaigns are usually created weeks or months in advance. You can have no idea what hot button topics will be trending when your scheduled posts hit the net. Social media automation has its pros and cons. Relying exclusively on automated posts to handle your social channels is a mistake. The best solution is to have a mix of automated and manually posted content. Additionally, you should constantly monitor how the feedback you receive. Thankfully, these situations can be avoided for the most part.

A social media fiasco can easily be prevented by doing the following:

• Educate your employees. Set company policies that will guide your company culture. Perhaps your entire staff could do a teambuilding exercise. Focuses on cultural sensitivity training. Have everyone understand what is appropriate behavior.
• Have a community manager. Hiring someone to handle your social media accounts may be a good idea. If you are unsure what approach to take, just stay away from confrontational posts. You don’t have to be the one to push the boundaries of social norms.
• Schedule posts in advance. Always avoid impromptu posting from official company accounts. However, in case that you do make a mistake, you should pause automatic posting for the time being.

2. Arguing with users in the comments and reviews

You have to come to terms with the fact that not every comment or review is going to be positive. You need to learn to deal with the negativity. That’s definitely better than taking it out on your customers. Also, you shouldn’t delete the comments you don’t like. You need to show your customers that you are willing to hear them out.  More importantly, show them that you can act on their complaints. Use that feedback to improve and grow.

Arguing and inflammatory comments can be seen as a sign of pettiness. Such behavior is far from appropriate for a professional company. Although there are many social media mistakes your business should avoid, sooner or later – you’re going to drop the ball. When that happens, it’s important to take your time to regain your composure. Come up with honest response to the criticism you are facing. Be sincere and honest in your public statement. It shouldn’t be too hard to earn back the goodwill of your customers.

• If you are lacking in strategic solutions to deal with such cases, you can always consult social media marketing New York marketing professionals. Our team will be more than glad to share its experience and offer assistance.

3. Being unresponsive to messages

One of the main strengths of social networks is their ability to engage users. Of course, that engagement won’t happen all by itself. Don’t leave messages and questions unanswered. That is just unprofessional behavior. Customer feedback is hugely important to the customer experience. There’s an additional benefit to answering the questions of your users. It will boost confidence in your brand and promote you as a leader in your branch. Prove to customers that they can turn to you when they need a reliable source of information.

4. Only posting advertising

Over-promoting is when you use your channels only for posting promotional material. Interestingly the 20-80 rule applies to marketing as well. This means that no more than 20 percent of what you post should be promotional content.

Users who follow your updates on the website and social media don’t want to be served ads. Offer them content they will actually be interested in. That’s the 80 percent we mentioned. If all you are doing on social media is self-promotion, you will quickly alienate your audience.

Make sure to offer your followers entertaining and engaging content. Guides and how-tos are also considered premium content by search engines. Any brand promotion needs to be subtle and intermixed with things people will be interested in. However, this doesn’t mean that you should post irrelevant content. Everything you post should be somehow tied to your products or brand.

5. Not posting enough

You’ve surely seen social media accounts of businesses where the last post is several months old. Is that account still active? Can you expect a response if you ask them a question? A lack of content can make users wonder if you are still in business. This can make them hesitant to message you and will lead to lost sales.

We realize that creating content is hard. However, you shouldn’t resort to the cross-platform posting of the same content. Social platforms are different from one another and foster specific types of communication. Therefore, you should ideally craft custom content for each one. If someone looks up your accounts on several social networks will they find the same exact posts? What incentive are you giving users to follow your multiple channels and share content on each one?

Summing up

We realize that there are many social media mistakes your business should avoid. Thankfully, with a bit of preparation and foresight, you should have no trouble navigating social networks. Just follow the tips from our article and your business will have a spotless reputation.

It’s possible to stay active on multiple social media platforms, although it can be difficult. If you need a hand to stay on top of things, you can consider hiring professional digital marketing New York experts. They’ll help create a diverse marketing strategy, specially adapted for your brand.